Taxation and the Quality of Entrepreneurship

We study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, taking into account both the amount of entry and the quality of new ventures. We show that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progressive taxes can increase entrepreneurial entry, while reducing average firm quality. So called "success taxes" increase startup of lower value business ideas by reducing the option value of pursuing better projects. This suggests that the most common measure used in the literature, the likelihood of entry into self-employment, may underestimate the adverse effect of taxation.Taxation; Entrepreneurial Entry; Quality of Entrepreneurial Firms

Does College Education Reduce Small Business Failure?

We estimate the effect of college education on business survival using the NLSY79. The endogeneity of both education and business ownership is accounted for by a competing risks duration model augmented with a college selection equation. Contrary to the previous literature, we fi nd no effect of college education on business failure. College however signi cantly increases employment survival. Unlike college, cognitive skills have a positive impact on employment survival for both the self-employed and employees. The results suggest that college affects the self-employed and salaried employees in different ways, for example generating skills more useful in employment than self-employment

Taxation and the Quality and Quantity of Entrepreneurship

We study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, taking into account both the amount of entry and the quality of new ventures. We show that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progressive taxes can increase entrepreneurial entry, while reducing average firm quality. So called success taxes increase startup of lower value business ideas by reducing the option value of pursuing better projects. This suggests that the most common measure used in the literature, the likelihood of entry into self-employment, may underestimate the adverse effect of taxation

HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer

We present HORNET, a system that enables high-speed end-to-end anonymous channels by leveraging next generation network architectures. HORNET is designed as a low-latency onion routing system that operates at the network layer thus enabling a wide range of applications. Our system uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no per-flow state on intermediate nodes. This design enables HORNET nodes to process anonymous traffic at over 93 Gb/s. HORNET can also scale as required, adding minimal processing overhead per additional anonymous channel. We discuss design and implementation details, as well as a performance and security evaluation.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

TARANET: Traffic-Analysis Resistant Anonymity at the NETwork layer

Modern low-latency anonymity systems, no matter whether constructed as an overlay or implemented at the network layer, offer limited security guarantees against traffic analysis. On the other hand, high-latency anonymity systems offer strong security guarantees at the cost of computational overhead and long delays, which are excessive for interactive applications. We propose TARANET, an anonymity system that implements protection against traffic analysis at the network layer, and limits the incurred latency and overhead. In TARANET's setup phase, traffic analysis is thwarted by mixing. In the data transmission phase, end hosts and ASes coordinate to shape traffic into constant-rate transmission using packet splitting. Our prototype implementation shows that TARANET can forward anonymous traffic at over 50~Gbps using commodity hardware

Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo

No abstrac

When politics are contagious: Covid-19 and political resistance inside an immigration detention center

During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration detainees in the United States rose up to protests their forced confinement during a global pandemic, launching collective hunger strikes across separate facilities on a national scale. In this article, I utilize primary and secondary sources to examine the strike that occurred at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego in the Spring 2020. While acts of resistance are hardly a new phenomenon in immigration detention, the 2020 protests were unusually powerful because of their range and the pace at which they spread across facilities. Their power was a direct consequence of Covid-19, not only because the pandemic triggered the strikes, but because it introduced a common condition of vulnerability among the detained population, thus encouraging collective organization. The strikes and the pandemic showed a common form of expansion, which was acknowledged by the authorities themselves, as they adopted the same strategies of lockdown and quarantine to contain both phenomena. The history of this protest, along with those that erupted across carceral sites globally during this period, constitutes an important testimony to the political effects of the pandemic, and to the possibility of political resistance in detention

Away from the border and into the frontier: The paradoxical geographies of US immigration law

This paper investigates US immigration law as a spatial system whose application results in geographic confusion. I take the case of Barton v. Barr as a vivid example of this structure, where the petitioner was found to be simultaneously "outside" and "inside" the country under a legal perspective. Beginning from this paradox, I focus on the law's ability to produce extraterritorial folds within the country's interior, thus confining aliens into spaces that escape constitutional rules. Through an engagement with legal geography and Niklas Luhmann's work, I conceptualize immigration law as a system which lives off the repetition of operations that distributes rights and privileges to aliens by assigning a degree of foreignness to their location. The resulting paradox must not be confused for a mistake or a flawed logic. Instead, it constitutes the dispositive that allows the law to produce its effects and draw its territorial enclaves

Colonial Heritage and Economic Development

While the importance of institutions for explaining cross-country income differences is widely recognized, comparatively little is known about the origins of economic institutions. One strand of the literature emphasizes cultural differences while another points at exogenous environmental factors such as mortality and climate. Both are supported by some empirical evidence. I reconcile the two schools of institutional origins by proposing a theory of self-selection of colonists to different geographic destinations. Exogenous characteristics such as climate, mortality and factor differences determine which type of settler decides to move to a particular colony. Settler type, in turn, shapes the institutional quality of the new country. The model is used to confirm observed regularities reported by previous researchers. Furthermore, robust new evidence is presented in support of this selection process. The results suggest that any theory of colonial development that does not take selection into account will be incomplete.Economic Development; Culture; Origins of Political Institutions

Tra lo spazio e le parole. Razza e linguaggio nello Standard American English.

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